With the growth of modem computing trends, there is an increased demand in portability and improved functionality of a mobile device, wherein a mobile device may be, but not limited to, a cellular phone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), a pager, a smart phone, or any other suitable portable electronic device capable of providing graphical interactivity, as recognized by one having ordinary skill in the art. Furthermore, with the convergence of mobile devices having improved functionality and stand alone computing systems, such as a desktop or laptop computer, having greater interactivity with the mobile device, there is a greater demand for improved functionality and quality of interactivity between multiple mobile devices and also interactivity between the mobile device and the stand alone computing system.
An emerging area in mobile devices is the ability to acquire, render and transmit graphical and/or video images. One example of convergence of multiple technologies is the placement of cameras on mobile devices. Another example is the development of interactive video games to be played on the mobile device. With these graphic intensive applications, there exist prior art limitations with regard to graphical architecture for generating the graphical output. One common problem in the mobile device is the limited power and memory resources. Current graphics rendering techniques, including three-dimensional graphics rendering techniques, require an extensive amount of power to perform the various and multiple steps in a graphics-processing pipeline. Furthermore, three-dimensional graphics rendering may also be memory intensive due to memory requirements for storing, among other things, vertex information, pixel information, and/or texture data. In modern mobile devices, due to size requirements and power requirements, there is an extremely limited amount of available space for providing memory resources and power consumption constraints severely restrict graphics rendering while maintaining an extended mobile device battery life.
Another specific limitation found within current mobile devices is limited physical real-estate for placing graphics rendering engines and also limited bandwidth availability for processing the graphics rendering data. As mobile devices become more compact, there exists less real-estate for the insertion of additional processors for performing the graphics processing operations, such as two-dimensional or three-dimensional rendering. Furthermore, the available bandwidth for transmitting the graphics rendering data is also limited. Among other things, size constraints prohibit a large data bus for graphics rendering information and therefore can severely restrict the processing speed and/or quality of a graphics rendering engine.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus that overcomes power consumption requirements, limited memory resources, limited bandwidth availability within the mobile device and provides for graphics rendering effectively using the limited available real-estate within the mobile device.